Author Topic: Liberals Wanted to use the VA as a Model for National Health Care  (Read 210 times)

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Liberals Wanted to use the VA as a Model for National Health Care

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 23, 2014 @ 6:49 pm In The Point | 2 Comments




ObamaCare could have been even worse. (via James Taranto)

In 2009, the Campaign for America’s Future, a collection of influential lefties within the Democratic Party,  ran a blog post that proposed to use the VA as a national health care model.

CAF events had featured Obama, Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. It was an influential organization pushing the party further to the left.

The post was by health care consultant Joe Paduda, who recently dismissed the people suffering under ObamaCare by writing, “‘When one person suffers it is a tragedy, when millions do, it is a statistic.’ As abhorrent as quoting Josef Stalin might be, the monster was right.”

If you want a window into the mindset that is responsible for the VA and ObamaCare, you could do worse than to contemplate the sort of person who thinks that way.

Arguing against the Medicare for Everyone proposal that’s a popular lefty vehicle to single payer, Paduda wrote, “Medicare is not controlling the primary driver of medical costs – utilization of services.”

“Medicare’s imaging expenses doubled between 2000 and 2007. Utilization of physician in-office services went up more than 10% in 2006.”

The VA however is super at controlling utilization of services, aka getting patients the tests they need so they don’t die.


“It’s the Veteran’s Administration, and rather than Medicare, i’d base a national plan on a dramatic expansion of the VA,” he said, claiming that while “the number of veterans receiving treatment from the VA more than doubled, from 2.5 million to 5.3 million, but the agency needed 10,000 fewer employees to deliver that care – as a result the cost per patient stayed flat.”

Much like a lot of VA patients. But as Stalin said, “The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.”

Merrill Goozner criticized Paduda’s proposal because few lefties were even willing to advocate for bringing the NHS’s single payer death machine to America.


“What Paduda failed to note was that the VA also is a single-payer-type system that delivers health care directly, just like the British National Health Service…  The problem with using the VA as a model for the public plan is that those who would accuse its proponents of advocating for “government-run health care” would be right. How many of those proponents would be willing to stand up and say at that point: “Yes, that’s what we’re for.”

Give it a little time.

Graves will be dug, vets will be buried and a year from now another lefty with CAP or some other outlet will write an article about how great the VA is and another lefty will suggest that we will turn it into national health care machine.

Because that’s what lefty does.

As Stalin said, “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”




Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/liberals-wanted-to-use-the-va-as-a-model-for-national-health-care/